750mph explain how shared storage has revolutionised their workflow

750mph have been providing audio post-production services to the world’s leading advertising agencies since 1998. In the process, they’ve gone from a single studio to an eight-room facility in the heart of Soho, and needed a shared storage solution that ensured collaboration stayed simple and efficient. Enter Dynamic Drive Pool storage and Jigsaw24…

By Liz Sunter May 03, 2018

“A lot of people in the audio industry have been wary about getting shared storage,” says Managing Director Ben Mason, echoing a worry we’ve heard from a number of audio customers. “There are five or six people in Soho who do what we do, and none of them were going for it, so we decided to bite the bullet and be the first.” The verdict? “It’s been amazing.”

“It’s revolutionised the way we work, because obviously once everyone’s working off central storage, you can literally walk out of studio one, up to studio eight, pick up the same job and keep working.”

Always do your homework

It’s no accident that 750mph are happy with their choice. Ben and the rest of the team did “a lot of research into what was out there, because we’d never really had anything that was fast enough for everyone to work off at the same time before.”

This included taking note of the setups they found in other post houses, client agencies and vendor demo rooms, and getting recommendations from as many end users as possible about the solutions that they spotted.

“We heard really good things about DDP and how it integrated with systems like ours, so one of our team went to Germany and checked out how a company there were using it, and I talked to other DDP users as well. Everyone had good stories about it.”

750mph now have a good story of their own – Ben says the system has “revolutionised the way we work, because obviously once everyone’s working off central storage, you can literally walk out of studio one, up to studio eight, pick up the same job and keep working. It’s been amazing. Before, we were moving things around and copying things on to storage and then off again to work, which was not particularly efficient.”

Keeping up with expansion

As 750mph have grown from one room to eight, their shared storage setup has grown, with Jigsaw24 being drafted in to upgrade their backup storage into a second ‘live’ pool. “I’ve known Jigsaw24 for years and done various jobs with them, so working with that team was good,” says Ben.

“We always kept a spare DDP, because the worry with central storage is that if it breaks, you lose eight studios’ worth of work, [but with the expansion] Jigsaw24 came in and brought our ‘spare’ up to spec, so now it’s in use and we have twice the storage.”

Moving forward

750mph continue to evolve, developing new workflows to handle the influx of client questions about sound for VR, and recently celebrating their Dolby Atmos room’s first anniversary. “Immersive and VR both require very different workflows [to our standard work],” says Ben, “but a fair amount of clients are looking into it, particularly VR now that that’s so much more accessible. And I think that projects that call for either immersive or VR sound are going to start coming along more and more.”